The Grooming Habits of Jupiter Jones, Intergalactic Housekeeper
by JacquiT
Summary: Jupiter Jones is not a morning person. Caine Wise is not a stylist. These two unrelated facts help bring them closer together.


_Note: Cross-posted on Ao3 as iluvdanimal._

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"Brush my hair."

Caine looked up abruptly from the sheave he'd been reviewing as he sat on the couch of their tiny shared apartment, waiting for his queen. Her scowl of irritation was almost like a knock to the back of his head. "Your Majesty?"

She slapped a hairbrush into his hand. "It is five o'clock in the morning and I. Do. Not. Want. To go. To work. If I have to scrub an able person's toilet, then an able person's gonna do my hair. Brush." Then she plopped herself down in front of him, cross-legged with her back turned and pressed against the couch. After a moment, a gentle, "Please?" escaped.

Jupiter Jones was not a morning person. Sure, her perspective had changed – vastly – since her discovery of her inheritance. But she was still figuring out what all of it meant, and what she was meant to do with it, in addition to still getting to know her new friends (in particular, the one she liked to kiss). Fortunately for her, Caine Wise would do anything to make Her Majesty happy, so this morning he set to correcting her foul mood by playing hairdresser.

He laid the hairbrush aside for a moment, and started by tilting her head back and gathering her hair in his hands, and twisting it gently to keep it off her shoulders. Then he rubbed his hands together to make sure they were warm, and pressed his thumbs against the base of her neck.

Caine heard the slow exhale of her breath and felt a minuscule loosening of her muscles. He worked his thumbs out slowly, keeping the pressure steady and then gradually adding his other fingers until he'd reached the outside edges of her shoulders. Then he pulled them back to the middle, and massaged her tense muscles with a slow, firm motion, from inside to out, until he could feel her spine relax, hear her breathing deepen and even out, smell her anxiety dissipate.

He moved her head to his lap, and his fingers deftly from her shoulders to her scalp. Her eyes stayed shut and she remained still as he stroked her head in deliberate, circular movements, from her forehead down to the base of her skull, and back up again. He paid particular attention to her temples, and the spots just behind her ears. "Oh . . . my . . . God . . . Caine. . . ."

When he was confident enough that she'd relaxed, he picked up the hairbrush and began working it through her long, silky tresses. He brushed longer than he really needed to; it didn't take very long for the strands to become untangled and fall through his fingers like water. Before he really realized what he was doing, he'd begun to twist it into an elaborate braid, securing it with a tie that was wound around the handle of the hairbrush.

He moved the tail of her hair so that it draped over her left shoulder, and kissed the top of her head. "Is that satisfactory, your Majesty?"

It was a well-established fact that the words _your Majesty_ spoken in a particular tone of voice were Caine Wise's way of saying _I love you_. But Caine also said _I love you_ in any number of other ways, which usually included taking care of her or her family without being asked. He just knew what to do. This was one of those times, and ordinarily Jupiter was both pleased and grateful, and didn't question the whys or the hows. But as Caine stood her up and handed her brush back, she knitted her brows and touched the back of her head.

"Where did you learn to braid hair?"

He instantly averted his eyes and ducked his chin, pausing a moment before he replied, "I learned when I was younger."

She nodded. "I gathered." Jupiter laid a gentle hand against his arm and was about to speak, but he interrupted her – a clear indication of how much he did not want to discuss the braiding of hair.

"You'll be late," he said, in his deep _I-love-you_ tone; this time asking for care instead of giving it.

She knew, and nodded. "Okay," she said with a warm smile. "Thank you."

He exhaled a short puff of breath through his nostrils, just because she always said it was cute, and smiled his usual not-quite-there smile, his lips turning up slightly at the corners, and his eyes crinkling.

They walked hand in hand to Vassily's house, where he left her in her mother's safekeeping. While she worked, he attended Stinger and Captain Tsing, and made sure he kept himself abreast of any Jupiter-related activity – even the mind-numbing gossips. Her Majesty had said she'd go home with her mother and have dinner there – Vassily's birthday, he recalled – so he worked until she let him know she was ready to be picked up.

He appeared at the Bolotnikov's house with a gift in hand, a bottle of Aqua Vit that the clerk at the store had told him was good quality. Vassily didn't need the extra alcohol – he was well-saturated by the time Caine got there – but accepted it with hearty thanks and kisses to both of Caine's cheeks. They were ushered out the door in a rush of drunken but sincere affection.

They walked arm-in-arm down the block in comfortable silence. Jupiter teetered on the edge of sober, and smelled of wine and food and her happy family – bleach and furniture polish and fresh laundry, Nino's perfume and Lyudmila's arthritis medication, Mikka's powdery makeup and Moltka's sunburned skin, and sometimes he swore he could smell Aleksa's cynicism – and he loved that scent so much he just let himself bask in it as they walked.

"Such a good day," she said when they paused for a cross walk. "Thanks to your massage this morning."

"It was my pleasure, your Majesty," he replied, looking down at her.

"You didn't have to bring Vassily anything," she said. "It was really sweet of you."

The tips of his ears turned pink, as they usually did when she complimented him. "He takes care of you," said Caine. "I'm grateful."

She smiled up at him, and the light turned, and they continued the short walk back to the apartment. He could tell Jupiter was tired, as well as content – she was quiet and pliant when he suggested they go right to bed. She brushed her teeth and donned her pajamas without much fanfare, commenting only that she was grateful she didn't have to work the next day.

When Caine had finished doing the same, he entered the bedroom to find her sitting up, lazily flipping through a sheave. He noticed that her hair was still in the braid he'd fashioned that morning.

"Anything interesting?" he asked.

She looked up at him, and her eyes glittered. "Not nearly as interesting as you."

His eyes smiled – he was having trouble getting his mouth to do the same, even after all these months – and he crawled onto the bed next to her.

"It's been a long day," he said, taking the sheave from her hand and placing it on the bedside table. She agreed with a sleepy grunt and snuggled close to him; her hands landed on his chest while he wound his arms and legs around her.

The tail of her hair laid along the curve of his right arm as she settled into a comfortable position. He picked it up with his left hand, feeling the silky braid with his rough fingers. "Jupiter?"

"Hm?"

"Would you like your hair let out?"

Her eyes opened, and she looked up at him. Her brows knit as she considered how best to ask the question that had been sitting in the back of her head all day long.

"Caine," she began, "you don't have to tell me, but I'd really like to know where you learned to braid hair like that."

He was still, the braid in his hand and her eyes caught by his. He swallowed.

"If you don't want to talk about it, it's okay. But . . . I'm curious. I'd just like to know. I figured you'd tell me it was an ex-girlfriend but the fact that you didn't want to talk about it this morning just made me more curious."

His breath was coming in short bursts, shallower than normal, but no faster. In order to help prevent any defensive behavior, she stroked his beard gently. "Only if you want to tell me. I know you don't always like to talk about things, so if that's the case, it's okay."

Caine studied her face. She was so careful with him sometimes – at just the right times – it made him want to howl. The feeling was painfully close to despair, but he knew that wasn't it. Despair was being alone – in Deadland, or the facility where he'd grown up, or his first rough years in the Legion – it was not measuring up, not being acknowledged, not being included. This feeling was the same kind of ache, deep in his chest, but instead of wanting to push it away, he wanted more of it; it was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time.

He swallowed hard. "You know we're bred in packs," he said. He knew it was an awkward place to start, but he also knew Jupiter would follow him. She nodded in acknowledgment, and he continued. "Five litters per pack, usually three or four pups per litter. My litter was five. . . . I have three brothers and a sister."

Jupiter had known Caine was the runt of his litter, and knew that had helped drive him to prove himself, but hadn't put much thought into what else that meant.

"Lycantants show affection by grooming each other. The trainers . . . they watch everything, and they know who in the litter, and then in the pack, has bonded by watching grooming habits – who scrubs whose back in the showers, who polishes whose boots, who cares for whose wounds after training. No one grooms the runt. But my sister, sometimes, would let me fix her boots, or her armor. Anyway – there was a litter of girls she'd train with and she loved to watch them braiding each others' hair. And my brothers would care for her – bandage her wounds, make sure she was comfortable – but they wouldn't-"

Caine almost stopped. Every time he thought of it, it hurt terribly. But maybe telling his queen would ease it, if even a little – if she knew how much he wanted, how hard he tried, to be a part of that pack, and just wasn't good enough, maybe the shared burden would rest more easily on his shoulders.

He looked away a little, shrugging. Jupiter knew full well what was coming next, but kept her eyes trained on Caine's face. "I wanted to go with her, when the pack left to train at the Legion facility. Not really because I felt close to her – I didn't. Just because I didn't want to be left alone. So I taught myself how to braid." There was so much left unsaid in that statement – the details about how he'd braid anything that could be braided, when no one was looking – which was often – from blades of grass to camouflage netting to torn pieces of his own clothing.

"I thought if she'd let me braid her hair, then she'd know I could take care of her, just like my brothers did. And then they'd see it, too, and. . . ." He swallowed again and furrowed his brow, and pressed on. "The problem was . . . she didn't really let me near. So I could never show her, except the last day we were together as a litter, before the pack left. . . ." He drew a deep breath. "I knew I wasn't going; I'd known for a long time. But that morning, I sat down behind her, and I braided her hair. It was the only time she'd ever let me touch her." He swallowed, hard. "They went with the pack that day, all of them. I was sold to the Legion Infantry the next day."

"How old were you?"

"We were about ten," he replied.

"You were just _b_ _abies_ ," she said, disgusted.

But he shook his head. "Full grown," he replied. "I'm the same size now as I was then. Well." He shrugged. "Same height."

She stroked his beard, and flitted her thumb across his lips. "Do you ever hear from them?"

He laughed outright. "No," he replied. "No – and they don't want to hear from me. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if they're alive, they're confident I'm dead, and that's okay."

Jupiter was silent for a long moment, and he could tell by the look on her face that she was trying to come up with just the right thing to say. But honestly, what was the proper response to "my brothers and sister kind of hope I died"?

"You don't have to say anything," he said, and stroked her cheek.

"I know you and I grew up in very different worlds," she replied. "And I really try not to judge the world you grew up in, like it's any better than mine. It's just hard to wrap my head around."

Caine kissed her forehead. "I have the same problem, sometimes," he said. "It's hard to understand your immigration status. Or Moltka and Mikka . . . they bicker over nothing. It's hard not to tell them not to complain because they've never been asked to try to kill each other."

Jupiter closed her eyes, but kept her hand on Caine's beard. He nuzzled her fingers and then kissed them.

"What's worse?" she mumbled a lazy moment later. " _Wishing_ for a sister you can't have, or _living_ with a sister you can't have?"

Absently, he played with her hair. "Different sides of the same coin," he replied. "Honestly, I'd forgotten I even knew how to braid until this morning when your Majesty pressed me into service."

Jupiter giggled, and snuggled closer. "Tomorrow morning when I wake up, I'll press you into a different kind of service."

Caine's lips quirked at the corners. "I will serve you faithfully as always, Jupiter Jones."

She smiled into his chest. As much as _your Majesty_ meant _I love you_ , her real name – not attached to loftier monikers like _Queen_ or _Nea-Seraphi_ – meant he was speaking as a soldier to a housekeeper, and she needed that as much as she needed _your Majesty_.

He wound the braided end of her hair in his fingers and contemplated a moment before whispering into her ear to ask again, "Would you like your hair let out?"

"Yes," she said, without hesitation. "Please."

And there was that feeling again, white-hot in the middle of his chest. He supposed he'd get used to it, one day, but hoped it wouldn't be soon. He slipped the elastic tie from the ends of her hair and tossed it across the room, and methodically unwound the now-haphazard braid. His fingers were carding through her hair when he followed Jupiter into blissful slumber.

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Thanks for reading!


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